


left it bruised and black and lame

by Canonymous



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Dave | Technoblade-centric, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extended Metaphors, Lowercase, Manberg Festival on Dream Team SMP (Video Blogging RPF), Nightmares, One Shot, POV Second Person, Toby Smith | Tubbo-centric, the other characters are mostly only mentioned, this is basically techs perspective on what happened at the festival + the aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:47:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28244136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canonymous/pseuds/Canonymous
Summary: it’s not hard to see why the comparison springs to mind—tubbo is all wide eyes and short limbs that he trips over in his haste to obey schlatt’s commands. you’re nowhere near as eager to follow his orders: you don’t want to shoot the puppy, really. but you don’t always get what you want.(or: an all lowercase fic on technoblade’s perspective of the festival, told in second person.)
Relationships: Toby Smith | Tubbo & Technoblade, Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit
Comments: 17
Kudos: 85





	left it bruised and black and lame

**Author's Note:**

> hi !!!! this is the first dream smp fic im uploading although i have quite a few in the works hehe :) i wrote this all in one day bc i got the idea at work and then went home and just wordvomited it out jdnskskf SO 
> 
> 1\. the cws for this are mentions of animal violence (its an extended metaphor!), mentions of violence, nightmares, anxiety symptoms like shaking or crying, etc! let me know if there’s anything i forgot to mention that could be potential ally upsetting :) be safe!
> 
> 2\. this might be a little hard to make sense of bc it’s really like flowery so i’m gonna put like a summary at the end just bc i know when things are difficult to understand having a little more context can help, but i don’t want to state it here to spoil for those who might not want that going in initially! so, head to the end notes for a summary :)
> 
> 3\. the title is from the song guilty by marina! 
> 
> 4\. enjoy!!!!

the thing about the festival is you don’t bring the gun with the intention to shoot the puppy.

it doesn't matter that you don’t think it’s necessary, or that this is a little below your pay grade, or even that you don’t want to. it doesn’t matter that he’s scared, or that the voices can’t seem to decide whether they can fully get behind you pulling the trigger. what matters to schlatt is this: you’ve spent years figuring out that you would do anything if you had to, and right now, he’s telling you that you have to. 

so. the puppy.

tubbo trots up to the microphone like a dog whose paws are too big for his wobbly little legs. it’s like he hasn’t learned how to balance just right, and is clinging to hope he’ll grow bigger and stronger. it’s reasonable, you think, to assume he will have vast amounts of time to get accustomed to how the world works and his place in it—until schlatt slithers past to seize the mic, calling your name and welcoming you to the stage. then, you begin to suspect time isn’t exactly on tubbo’s side.

they shove him into what reminds you of a crate, and a small one, at that. he trembles and presses his back into the wall as far as he can go, feet slipping on the black stone beneath him and fingers pressed so hard into the bars they leave red indentations, his big, blue eyes wandering in idle search of a miracle before landing squarely on his executioner. it’s worse because even then, there’s something so hopeful about his expression, a tail still wagging even as a soft whine starts and stops somewhere in his little chest. maybe it’s all he knows how to do. maybe he thinks there’s dignity in refusing to howl.

there isn’t. all there is is the puppy, the gun, and the snake hissing his instructions aside. “ _take him out,”_ he urges, barely loud enough to be distinguishable from half the voices in your head whispering the same. 

so you’ve never shot a puppy but you shoot the puppy, and tommy appears in seconds to swing his sword down on your fingers. or: the mutt comes barreling out of nowhere as if drawn by the scent of the blood and he bites you when you reach a hand out to calm him. he bites you again when you pull your hands back. he just needs to sink his teeth into something, you think, and you already shot the snake, too, so maybe you’re all that’s left he can hurt.

“you killed him,” he howls, and then doesn’t stop howling, a piercing, aching thing that startles everyone left alive in the area. “tubbo—! _tubbo_!”

they chase the mutt out the other direction as you make your escape, and you can’t find it in you to laugh at the irony of them being hot on the heels of a hound. you’re just tired. your arms ache with the weight of what you’ve done (or more literally, the knockback on the crossbow after you fired it into the crowd several times.) either way, it hurts. it hurts because it doesn’t hurt, not really—at the end of the day, you have killed much more than just a puppy in your lifetime, and you’ve long since shed the kind of guilt that comes from pulling the trigger. 

they manage to catch the mutt, too, in the end. you’re just grateful you’re not the one with the gun that time.

* * *

the thing about the aftermath is you never really forget how the puppy said your name. how he didn’t choke and whine and beg like you might expect, how he’d just picked his best option and kept saying it until he couldn’t anymore. “ _technoblade_ ,” he’d pleaded, high pitched and not quite believing. “ _technoblade?”_

it’s not hard to imagine how it’d sound if it went differently, though, by any means. not when the puppy wails in the dead of night, broken, hoarse pleas floating all the way down the narrow ravine like a crueler rendition of execution day. you don’t think the puppy knew how to beg like that before he was made to, and you hate so much that you had to be the one to teach him. that the lesson stuck so viciously it chases him into his dreams. you’d maybe try your hand at reassurance, or even explanation, if you could—but tommy waits outside the doorway, posted every night like a guard dog sure to growl and snap and snarl with gnashing teeth if you dare approach. 

(you can’t blame him, not really. you remember the way he glanced back, over and over again, at _wilbur_ even after he’d pushed him into the pit. he’d paid little attention to where he was aiming his anger, then, teeth snapping around insults and questions alike, claws scrabbling uselessly on the stone. that was the difference: you had gone into the pit with the express purpose of settling what you’d started when you pulled the trigger. wilbur just pointed the dog at you and told him that his urge to _bite_ could have meaning. it was just a shame it still wasn’t you he wanted to hurt. how could he target the real killer, here? the snake had hung back in the grass, still stained with the blood of hounds. all that was left was the blade, and wilbur knew damn well a dog closing its teeth around that would hurt himself all the same.

the puppy had gotten a little closer to snapping at you, when tommy went down, all charred five feet six inches of him tensed up like this might be his turning point. the closest you’ve seen yet.)

it’s still a hell of a deterrent. he’s so _angry_ , all the time, so close to catching a bit of skin in his teeth and tugging until he _actually_ wounds you. you don’t think he’s really capable of it (especially given how the sword wounds on your hands have already healed) but you know better than to underestimate a scared, pissed off dog. either way, he puts on an impressive show, haunches raised and teeth bared any time he isn’t busy yapping. 

you think when it comes down to it, schlatt put the wrong dog down. he could’ve woven a tale from that, some story of how he was simply putting him out of his misery—‘look, see, how he foams at the mouth? this is not the good dog you think you knew.’ you’ve never been the greatest at reading people, but the mutt is a much easier enemy to shape, you think, than the puppy.

but, you suppose, schlatt’s order was never about painting himself in a good light. it was about making it abundantly clear who sat at the top of the food chain, in front of all the little woodland creatures in the yard that is no longer a yard because it crawls with feral intruders and houses a fence no longer. it didn’t matter what scurrying, scampering little thing walked into the crate; all that mattered was they waited with baited breath while snake bit out, _“make it hurt,”_ and you obeyed. 

(he’d just _stared_ as he said your name, with those big blue puppy dog eyes, like you had any more control over it all than he did. foolish, in a way. ignorant, more like, ill-informed by wilbur in all his idealistic fantasies of your loyalty. you think the puppy knew deep down what you know: the gun was always a gun, and in that same way, you have always been a blade.)

the other aspect of the mutt’s combative, spiteful nature is how that’s only half the story. you watch him trod the ravine every day, chasing the coattails of a man who will no longer spare him a second glance, his vocabulary made of the kind of quiet pleading you didn’t realize he was still capable of, anymore. “please, wilbur,” he whines, “you don’t have to do this. please. there’s still time, we can—we can take it all back.”

you’re just thankful that in tommy’s case, at least, you're not the one who taught him he has to beg to even be heard. you aren’t about to tell him it’s pointless—maybe he isn’t the puppy, but he gets damn near it in those moments he tilts his head up and stares at wilbur like his keen eyes can see something you know has long since died. maybe he isn’t the puppy, but there’s something you know you can never get back, once you lose the youthful optimism tommy’s still holding onto the barest threads of.

you try not to think about how it wasn’t that long ago that wilbur still clung to it, too.

* * *

the thing about dogs is they say they have a short memory. you’re inclined to believe ‘they’ would be wrong, as you sit on the ground weeks after you shoot him, just trying to keep him from falling apart.

see, because you figured coming into tubbo’s room to try and ward off the nightmares that grip him would end in disaster, and you weren’t necessarily wrong. you just couldn’t focus for all the howling, and by the time you reached his door, for once void of the mutt, you felt obligated to do _something._ sure, he’d stopped screaming outright, but he’s making this awful little whine that almost sounded like bargaining and you just couldn’t bring yourself to turn away again. 

if you could go back in time, you don’t think you’d stop yourself. you were so certain every pair of eyes on your back belonged to a creature with claws, and the voices had gone so long without blood, and, like schlatt said, you were old friends. you wouldn’t stop yourself. but this isn’t back in time, and the technoblade that undoubtedly lurks in the puppy’s head through the night doesn’t owe anyone anything. no, there’s no reason to let the you of his dreams do it over and over again.

if you could go back in time, you don’t think you’d stop yourself, but maybe you’d find the puppy after the respawn and offer some words of comfort. an apology that isn’t followed by a blast of light that burns its worth and so much more immediately after. 

the puppy doesn’t care about what you would or wouldn’t do now; hell, he’s already technically forgiven you. it’s not important right now. what’s important is the puppy is twitching like he’s running for the hills in his dream, muscles taut with the strain of an invisible enemy. he sounds so scared, and you hear it, this time, all the bargaining he didn’t manage to get out in execution day, he bucks helplessly under his twisted blanket and shouts, “please, _please_ , _please!_ ”

you wonder if it’s worse, knowing whether the gun pressed to the puppy’s forehead is loaded or not. if he wishes for that kind of blind trust wilbur handed him on the day of while he’s wrought with a dreadful kind of certainty in his dreams. food for thought, you guess.

you stop whatever technoblade shaped mirage is blasting his way through tubbo’s skull by shaking him abruptly awake. it’s a bad idea for so many reasons— _genius, you’re replacing one technoblade with another technoblade, except this time you’re real. that’ll help—_ and it doesn’t even work for a solid thirty seconds where he’s just limp and panting in your hands. it’s fucking disturbing how vulnerable he is, and the guilt that never quite sunk in at the festival tears its way through your chest with a vengeance as the voices pipe up, _blood for the blood god, blood, blood, blood._

you are a blade, but the voices have never come close to the handle—you ignore them entirely as the puppy dog eyes shoot open and widen tenfold. you’re close enough you can see the shine of tears in them. 

the puppy trembles violently, his canine teeth chattering as he sucks in a frantic breath. his hands fly up to grasp at yours on his shoulders and they latch on immediately, fingers digging into your wrists and tugging you forward. you’re extremely lucky you recognize what he’s doing, else you might mistake his clumsy reach for comfort as aggression—he pulls you forward and thus himself into your arms, still shaking vehemently. 

he says something, then, against your chest, but it’s so soft you can barely even make out the rumble of his vocal cords. if you didn’t know any better, you’d guess it was a growl, but the puppy just noses his way closer. 

“can i move my hands?” you ask, because he’s still got a grip on them both and they’re pulled at kind of an awkward angle behind his head. 

he does say something against you, then, and when you don’t answer he repeats it. “the gun,” he says, clawing blindly at your palms. _checking_ , you think, _for the gun._ he sags with relief when he finds no such weapon, releasing your hands and tugging his arms to his chest to curl into a ball.

the puppy seeks out a warm body even if it’s raised a hand to him in the past—he can’t stop the whimpering by himself. the whining is a smaller symptom of a deep, unexplainable hurt and the puppy would stop if he knew why it hurt but he doesn’t so he can’t. so you place your hands solidly on his back and hold him in place where he's pressed his face into your chest, the wet of his tears reminiscent of a cold nose, sniffling. 

you think his memory is pretty spot on, actually. he learned the day of the execution to pay close attention to what those around him are capable of: the puppy had seized your hands because he had seen them hurt. he remembered the blast of the gun and the finger on the trigger and yet, still, he sits wrapped in the arms of a blade.

“does this help?” you wonder, incredulous even as the puppy bobs his head. “even if it’s me?”

he’s muffled still, as he speaks, quiet enough you think maybe he really has learned when not to howl.

“it was cold,” he tells you, simply.

you think back to the day of, staring down at a dog clawing at concrete and railing. he’d taken his suit coat off at some point during the festivities, and you remember his teeth chattered, then, too, the way his hands had difficulty bending around the bars with how stiff they were.

 _it was cold,_ you think, _the day you shot the puppy. he was cold._

you swallow around your next question. he’s falling back asleep, anyway, his fingers unfurling where they now clutch at your sleeves. you reach over his head to tug the blanket over, carefully, tucking it around him as he loses his hold completely to unconsciousness. 

you do not move. you think the very least you can do, for now, is allow the puppy a little warmth. 

**Author's Note:**

> Summary: Technoblade shoots Tubbo at the festival and likens it to having to shoot a puppy. He carries the metaphor through the aftermath, discussing not only Tubbo as the puppy but Tommy as the protective mutt, wary because Tubbo struggles with nightmares about the festival. Technoblade eventually gets the chance to try and comfort Tubbo at the end, and it all turns out relatively fine, considering. 
> 
> thanks so much for reading and PLEASE let me know if you liked it in the comments !!! happy holidays <3


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